You miss his point. His point is that if you think that there are T1000 kill bots wandering around, you are an idiot. If you think that these will be available in the near future, you are delusional. We will certainly see more robots on the field of combat, but they are not going to be making much in the way of ethical decisions.
I think people don't understand how robots are going to take over the battle field. What is a missile? It is as an "autonomous" robot that seeks out and destroys a target. Sure, you need to tell it what target, but once it fires it will hunt down that target and kill it. That is the sort of thing you will see. You will see weapons where the human can move further and further back from the trigger, and this will happen very slowly. We won't suddenly start crapping out kill bots that roam the street.
There are going to be two big drives towards the increased use of robots in combat.
First, you are going to see a massive increase in the use of drones. Why bother sending an entire airplane with soft and chewy human inside when you can put the humans cockpit on the ground and have a military lawyer leering over his shoulder? Why bother sending some poor saps to run a convoy of supplies when you can keep the drivers in a nice AC controlled trailer and you can keep the gunners surrounded by leering military lawyer reminding them of the prices wording of the roles of engagement?
The US military is really good at defense. In fact, it is pretty much unbeatable when it comes to defending itself from anything other than a first world military power. The Green Zone in Iraq is an almost impossible target where amazingly few people have died. The problem is that when you need to leave a defensive position, you open yourself up to attack. When marines get attacked, they tend to shoot back instead of dying. When you shoot back in a city, people, good and bad, die. Drones help alleviate this problem by first making it so that there is no risk to the operator, removing the kill or be killed mentality that bullets whizzing over your head tends to inspire. Second, it lets command and their small army of lawyers make sure that no one violates the rules of engagement (ROE). Violating the ROEs is easy when you have someone shooting at you. Your buddies are unlikely to inform on you for shooting back (even if it violates the ROE), and you feel a certain moral justification. When you are piloting a drone from an trailer with AC where everything you do is recorded and you have not only your commander, but a lawyer leering over your shoulder, you are a whole lot less likely to violate the ROE. This is what the US military desperately wants. They want a way to go on the offensive with minimal risk to their own soldiers lives AND minimal risk to civilians. Expendable drones that don't care if they die instead of firing back into a crowd are pure gold in the military's thinking.
Second, you are going to see an increase in automated response systems. You will not see terminators, but you might very well see a laser/gun on top of an Humvee shoots at RPG rounds fired at it. You will see these weapons increase in capability slowly over time until they are more and more reactive. These systems will almost certainly be defensive or informative in nature. Imagine a system where if a Humvee sensor spots a gun, it instantly flashes s a high powered light at the target to blind it, plops the targets location down on a map inside the Humvee, takes a picture of the target, and trains a gun on it that will fire on order. I doubt you will see lethal weapons automatically killing people any time soon, but you absolutely will see non-lethal weapons firing without permission. You will also see lethal weapons that prepare to fire and ask for confirmation.
There two methods of increased robotic armies will happen very slowly over time. Eventually, it might lead to automated fighting machines that only call back home to confirm their actions, but it will be many years from now, and it won't be rombas armed with nuclear tipped missiles.
There are two reasons why this guy got dinged. The "competition" piece is one. He has access to sources and reporters, and for that reason anything he writes is suspect. It is pretty easy to think of his as using company resources. It isn't the end of the world, but it is something you want to be open about with your boss.
The other reason why he probably got nailed is because the fact that his job is supposed to be an independent and objective media man, yet he was vocally and publicly anything but. It is one thing to keep a blog about trains or food. It is another thing to be have a hand in an "objective" (yeah, CNN objective, go ahead and laugh) news organization while publicly broadcasting his bias. This is like being a company PR person and being surprised when you get fired after streaking through a news conference. Yeah, that is your "private" life, but part of your value is a perception of integrity. It isn't like that bar is all that high. It is pretty clear lots of people in the news media have a bias, but what makes them and him different is that when Bill O'Reily spews his bias, it is in a form that Fox News approves and markets for. On the other hand NBC would be pissed off of their nightly news anchor started to publicly campaigning for a candidate. They don't care if he tells people in private that he wants Obama to win, but he has to at least keep up the barest minimum of a show of being a "unbiased" reporter.
The reason why they fired this guy is because the last thing in the world they want is for Bill O'Reily to post excerpts of his blog showing that he is a flaming liberal, and then attacking CNN for being a bunch of hippie loving liberals. Yeah, it is hypocritical coming from Fox News, but Fox News wears its bias on its sleeve.
The judge later amended the court order to state that the bank documents need to be removed and took out calling for the domain to be taken. The domain is still down, but the site is still exist with its IP and is mirrored just about everywhere. The larger point is that one silly little low level court judge made a really dumb order that is going to stand for about 30 seconds before he gets smacked around by a bigger judge with a bigger beating stick. Further, this type of action is pocket change compared to hate sites and libel cases that are common in Europe. The US has problems, weak free speech laws are not one of them.
*This is a silly article. That court order was one minor judge, and he backed off it almost the second he let the words slip from his mouth. Further, the rulings of one low level judge does NOT make law.
This is a silly article. That court order was one minor judge, and he backed off it almost the second he let the words slip from his mouth. Further, the rulings of one low level judge does make law. If there was actual precedence set by having this work up the chain of courts, you might have an argument. Until that time, this is just one crappy judge who can have everything he says promptly overturned by the many layers of judges higher than him.
If you want to look at real censorship in the west, turn your eyes outside of the US. The US has no censorship laws around hate speech and almost no libel laws. Almost anything short of conspiracy to commit a crime is a-okay in the US. You can safely write or speak that you think the Holocaust is a hoax, that all the should die, and that is a whore who fucks pigs and goats. None of the above will get you in trouble with US law. All of the above would get you in trouble in more than one European nation. I am not saying that extremely weak libel laws and a lack of hate speech laws is a good thing, just that it decidedly tips the US over on the "free speech" spectrum farther than the vast majority of other nations out there.
There are a lot of complaints you can level against the US like starting wars, kidnapping and torturing people, extra judicial prisons, warrantless wiretaping, etc. That said, free speech is one places where the US is about as liberal as one can possibly be and takes it to extremes that few other nations do.
There is even further silliness that goes on. It could be that people who have cell phones are more likely to drink coffee with saccharine which causes an elevated risk of cancer (I am not saying that is true). What they see is a correlation. It is an interesting correlation, but I would suggest taking it with a grain of salt. There are all sorts of correlations you can find that mask the true underlying cause. I mean hell, for a simple non-PC correlation that will make people's head spin, correlate skin color in the US with education, crime, and income. If you buy that correlation you will end up believing that some how melanin (skin pigment) vastly elevates your chances of becoming a low paid, poorly education, criminal. Correlations just show that two trend move together, not that the trends have anything to do with each other. So, being black might mean that you have an elevated likelihood of being impoverished or sent to jail, but it certainly isn't that pigment causing those things. It is far more likely the fact that you are more likely to have been born in a shitty neighborhood where people get poor wages, poor education, and there is an elevated level of crime.
The same holds for cell phones. People with cell phones might be more likely to get cancer then those without, but it might be that people with cell phones are more likely to perform some behavior that is more likely to give them cancer. You can try and control for these factors, but well, you can only control for the factors that you know exist. If the common link between cell phones and cancer is that cell phone users are more likely to buy sushi, and sushi gives you cancer, the available data won't tell you.
I am not saying that cell phones certainly don't give you elevated chances of cancer, I am just saying that you shouldn't assume that they do because someone found a correlation. If you let your life be ruled by correlations you will quickly go made and likely be no better off for it.
You miss the point of the program. The types of attacks is constantly shifting. Where it shifts to might be unpredictable, but that doesn't mean that you can't catch the shift as it happens. So, imagine all of a sudden you get a few small, but successful attacks on Shiite elementary schools in a certain providence. Your correlation notices that there have been a few attacks, it notes that the attacks 'success' matches what counts as 'success' (high body count, media exposure, low losses, political change, increased sectarian strife, etc.) from previous shifts in targets, and alerts you to expect more attacks on school in that providence, and warns that in a months time you might be facing such attacks in other providences.
On the other hand, imagine that there are a few attacks on school buses. You might be tempted to draw the same conclusion as the school attacks. However, the bus attacks don't meet the pattern. They result in "failure", whatever that might be (high causalities on attackers, minimal media coverage, low body count, etc). The program says not to pour all your resources into fighting this new threat as it is unlikely that the attacks will continue.
I am not saying whether or not such a program is going to work, but the principle is sound. Some types of events lead to other types of events. You might not be predicting what happens in a year, but you might catch a trend before it spread across the entire nation.
Crap like this study is why "sociology" has been downgraded to about the level of astrology in the views of the scientific community. They find some correlation somewhere, and figure out a Marxist theory that somehow could explain the correlation, and then spew this sort of passive aggressive crap. Every time I see a report by a socialogist I want to take and beat them with a stats text book until they realize that A) CORRELATION DOES NOT FUCKING IMPLY CAUSATION. That goes double and triple when look at social factors then tend to correlate on all sorts of utterly unrelated and independent things. B) Act like a science and put the copy of Marx down. I got to know known the entire 2006 Master of Social Science class at the University of Chicago (this is the top 1 or 2 school for social science). There were a lot of good and fun people among them, but they ALL shared one thing in common. They were all raging over the top socialist. Never in my entire life have I seen such a complete lack of diversity in thought. As an evil terrorist engineer, I met people with all types of beliefs and value systems. Sociologist the other hand are almost entirely and uniformly extreme leftist. The only diversity they have among them is if they are super leftist or ultra-radical leftist. I am left of center, and I still found it utterly nauseating.
I don't know what the hell it is they are doing to the kids that enter social science. I am not sure if it is just that somehow all the teachers are radical leftists and all the kids who don't carry around a copy of Marx throw up their hands in disgust, or if they really are so crafty at brain washing, but it is sad, pathetic, and the lack of critical thought in social science has made it a field of junk science. The insular, circular, masturbatory thought that goes on inside American's social science academic institutions is pathetic. With not a single critical voice in the entire field, the result is ideas (good and bad) receive no real criticism from anything that isn't in deep left field.
The result? You get this sort of crap publish where a social "scientist" finds two correlations and instantly links them together. This same sort of logic would leave you to believe that skin pigmentation causes you to be a criminal. Here, lets use social "science" methods on something else. Blacks are more likely to be criminals than whites in the US. Blacks have higher levels of skin pigment. Therefor, skin pigment must give you a "criminal mindset". That is the sort of junk science that social science methods will lead you to believe. God forbid they take a deeper look at anything and find any other potential relationships that don't fit with their narrow world view. Just say no to social "science".
I am sorry, I think I missed your argument. Your argument is that Bush is the devil and that somehow this translates into GM not making environmentally friendly cars.
GM doesn't make environmentally friendly cars unless they have to because they cost more and Americans really don't give a shit. There is certainly a small market for hybrid cars in working professional elite who can afford them and see them as status symbols. This really is the only reason why GM doesn't sell environmentally friendly cars. Simply put, people want cheap cars far more than they want green cars.
Corporations are big dumb beasts. They will do pretty much exactly what you want them to do. If the people want gas guzzling SUV pieces of shit, they will get them. If they wanted to drop an extra $10,000 more into their car for a "green" car, they would get those too.
You should be skeptical when someone says they can say the ocean has risen 0.2mm. If that is the only number they have given, they are liars, stupid, or both. The world's oceans might very well have risen that much, and it might very well be something you can measure. That said, I can promise that there is an uncertainty in that measurement. Someone who fails to report their level of uncertainty is either incompetent or taking you for a ride. This is why I suggest taking newspaper science with a grain of sea salt. 0.2mm with a 95% confidence of +/- 0.01m is a whole hell of a lot different from 0.2mm with a 95% confidence of +/-0.2mm.
I tried persuading all my friends, citing the freedom argument, the security argument, the stability, community etc. Nothing worked. Then I learned how. Show them the spinning cube (With my heavy metal friends, I go for a pentagonal prism), and shout 'It's free! It's free!' Over and over. You my friend have a future job at Apple.
OMG!!!11!!! The plastic... it is so shinny... and white... and smooth... ohhhhh.
I am totally against this completely unconstitutional, unreasonable and illegal search and seizure. I hate to burst your bubble, but the UK doesn't have a constitution. Further their simple domestic non-terrorist related search and seizure laws would give a US defense lawyer a heart attack and while the police would prance around with mirthful joy. What is proposed is entirely legal in the UK and in now way inhibited by any constitution like documents.
As far as RFID and DNA goes (and I assume you are talking about the US, and not UK like in the article), there is no constitutional barrier collecting criminal DNA in the US. In the US you are entitled to "due process", but once you get your due process they can merrily collect evidence as they please and keep the records of it until hell freezes over. For better or for worse, your DNA is evidence. In the same way they keep a picture or fingerprints you on file, they can also keep your DNA as just another metric used to tell if you commit another crime.
The issue isn't keeping such evidence. I don't mind if a rapist gets all his information stored away on some computer for life. The larger concern is what constitutes a crime and if we are using our technology properly in a court room. We have a problem that is only going to get worse. We are going to continue to be able to collect more and better evidence from crimes. The problem is that this evidence will become more and more technical as time goes on. The problem isn't DNA evidence, it is interpreting DNA evidence. I can interpret witness testimony, logical arguments, and things of that nature using the faculties that everyone is born with. Interpreting complex technologically based evidence on the other hand demands a specialist. The jury basically is forced to listen to a specialist and simply trust that their judgment is correct, because there is no way they can see and interpret the evidence for themselves.
Well... all of these things are exactly what you confront when you finish your bachelor's degree. I know it was a tremendous shock to me after having been goaded on for years to get good grades in high school, then to go to college, then to hang in there--goaded using all of these reasons for sticking with it--only to find out that college doesn't provide you with wealth, the ability to get paid for what you think, a way to avoid dead-end jobs, having to start at the absolute entry level, or getting paid nothing for all of the above... Let me guess, you scored a liberal arts degree? Poor foolish bastard.
Not yet anyways. Unless another underground lake of crude is found, it might be cheaper to convert coal into synthetic oils through a process known as "Coal Liquefaction".
Once your coal resources are being used for other things besides generating power, the cost of electricity will go up. How much and how soon is anyones guess at this point however. Even this is not a huge worry. Making oil out of coal is fairly expensive. There are a lot of much easier and cheaper ways to get oil. Hell, Canada has as much oil as Saudi Arabia in its shale oil fields (think tar like oil that takes extra processing). Further, the US has a massive coal supply. I think it was projected at being a 250 year coal supply or something like that. There is nothing that can deplete that in the next 100 years.
The only good reason to think about alternative energies for the grid in the US is to be more green. If consumer energy prices go up, it will only because he intentionally made them go up through carbon taxes, carbon trading, and other such efforts to provide a market reason to dump coal in favor of greener technologies. People really need to separate out the oil issue with the consumer electricity issues.
I am not at all against working for a greener grid, but the oil issue is probably the bigger of the two issues. Oil produces both environmental harm and opens up oil consuming nations to economic and political harm. Some of the best solutions to the oil problem is to make it a grid problem. Plug in hybrids or even hydrogen powered cars could make it so that ALL problems are a grid problem. Then, once you make the grid both green and economical, you make the transportation industry green and economical.
Oil at $100 does NOTHING to electricity prices. Oil is almost never burned to make electricity. The only time you burn oil to make electricity is when you need to meet a sudden increase in demand. You can turn on a gas turbine very quickly while coal, nuclear, etc takes months or years to turn on. Once you have met the demand, you can simply turn it off. The only thing high oil prices does is make running car off the grid (through hydrogen, batteries, whatever) more attractive. Of course, as soon as you actually start powering your entire transportation industry off the grid the price of electricity goes up and oil looks more attractive...
The only good reason to worry about where our electricity comes from is for environmental reasons. There is absolutely nothing economically wrong with burning coal for another hundred years or so.
Are you for the censorship of books? Do you think that Harry Potter needs to be tossed before a government review board to decide it is ok for children. If the review bored decides that its depictions of violence are too much, should a librarian or book seller be tossed fined or and thrown before a court?
When you can stand up to me and tell me that ALL media, including art, books, newspapers, music, etc need to go before a fucking government censorship board, than I will swallow that you despise free speech enough to actually want this. Until then, it is far more likely that video games are just the target of the month because Clinton reads books, but probably doesn't indulge in video games all that often. Oh yeah, and the first politician to suggest that we need to pass books through a fucking government censorship board would (rightly) have their balls (or ovaries) removed first by the public, and than again by the courts.
It isn't new physics. It is called geometry. If you fire a gun at a target that is 5cm big at point blank range, you will hit it. If on the other hand you fire at a target that is 5cm big that is 5 miles away (assuming the bullet fire perfectly straight and didn't drop) you would miss. That is because even the slightest deflection results in missing. The difference between being a degree off when you are at point blank range, and when you are a mile off is massive. Do you want me to do the calculation for you?
These people should be punished. Here are my problems what happened.
1) Hitting a helicopter "by accident" is roughly impossible. The laser shoots out a beam that is at most a couple of centimeters in diameter. The odds of a beat that small hitting a helicopter by accident is damn near zero. That is like closing your swatting at the air, and snapping a fly that is buzzing around your head out of the air by accident. It is bullshit. A helicopter at 500 feet is a target smaller than a few centimeters. Your chance of randomly pointing at it are roughly zero. Far more likely than an "accident" is that they pointed at the helicopter because green lasers are cool and when you have one, you want to laser everything in sight. A jury just needs to find them guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt". I have a very reasonable doubt that that it was an accident (though that is up to a jury to decide in the end).
2) Every green laser comes with a warning telling you specifically NOT to point at people and vehicles. The laser doesn't even have to hit your eye directly, simply having it hit something reflective inside the cockpit is enough to blind the the pilot. Hitting the pilot in the eye is enough to cause some harm. Even if they caused no harm, it was dangerous and stupid and very well could of. Driving home drunk is also dangerous and stupid, and you will get nailed for it even if you fail to wipe out a mini-van full of children. Yes, the law really can (and should) smack you across the head for being dangerous and stupid to others.
Unless it turns out that they had some sort of malicious intent (which I doubt, they were probably just dumb), I don't think that they should face the maximum penalty, and I doubt they will. That said, they should be smacked hard enough for it to hurt to serve as a warning to others that firing high powered lasers at vehicles is a bad thing. It is lack nabbing a drunk driver. Even if they did no harm and feel bad, you still punish because it will discourage future stupidity and it will serve as warning to others that such stupidity will not be tolerated.
There are a lot of dumb federals laws on the books. The law against firing high powered lasers at vehicles is not one of them.
The problem is that democracy sucks. Democracy leads to countless evils. Slavery in the US was democracy in action, as were Jim Crow Laws. The South splitting from the US was democracy in action. Hitler rising to power was democracy in action. There is nothing "good" about democracy other than it leaves a way to kick someone who is utterly incompetent out of power. Democracy is less likely to cause brutal oppression than a dictatorship due to the electorate having the ability to remove the government, but it is by no means a guarantee.
The US constitution, something that is generally revered as being as a model constitution is an example of an UNDEMOCRATIC document. The constitution sets in place limits that a democratically elected government must follow, irregardless of what the will of the people is. It sets in place a method of changing the constitution that demands far more than a "democratic" majority vote. The Supreme Court which upholds the constitution is an example of an undemocratic institution. In fact, I would say the things I like best about the American part are its undemocratic parts, not the democratically elected pieces of it.
So, is a filibuster an example of an anti-democratic purpose? Hell yes, and I love it! The best thing about the American system is the fact that a simple majority can't impose its will upon the minority. In order to get even the simplest of things done, you need a majority of 60%. To get truly earth shattering done (like changing the constitution), you need a super majority well over 2/3's. This is a good thing. This is one of the reasons why despite Europe being far more liberal than the US, the US still has much strong free speech laws. It isn't because Americans are hippies, it is because the non-democratic aspects of the American government make it virtually impossible to pass anti-free speech legislation, and even when it is passed, it promptly gets struck down.
I say hurray for the non-democratic institutions. I think we need MORE of them. This world needs more liberal (liberal as in liberty, not leftist) institutions and less democracy.
Uh, I give the odds roughly a 0.000000000000001% chance that he will stay in office. If you believe that Bush is going to stay in office for even a second longer than the end of this term, you are kind of an idiot. Nothing short of a nuclear holocausts that destroys Washington AND the president in waiting could keep him in office for another term. If Bush tried to stay in office, the following would happen; the secret service step aside as the ex-president went to jail. If the secret service fought that (which they wouldn't by the way, they give their oath to the constitution, not the president, but lets play pretend), law enforcement would remove him. If they couldn't a riot of people would remove him. If they couldn't the military would remove him. The presidents authority only extends as far as his ability to give orders and have them followed. Absolutely no branch in the US government, both civilian and military, would follow an order let an ousted president stay on in office, even if an ex-president suffered a sudden psychotic episode that would make him try and give such an order. All branches of the US government and military swear and oath to the constitution, NOT the president.
Take off your tin foil hat. It is frying your brain.
There are few things more annoying than when people ignore scale. What Moscow does and what Washington does in terms of media manipulation is night and day. Washington does merrily try and get its perspective thrown into a favorable light... like all the other governments in the world. It might even use shitty tactics some times. The difference is the scale. Washington performs card tricks while Moscow makes 747's disappear. Last time I checked, no one is dying to find a loop hole to keep Bush in office and his approval rating is hovering somewhere around a truly impressive 30%. If anything, all of Bush successors are trying desperately to avoid using his name as anything other than a curse word. The opposition party in the US (Democrats) are in the processes of trashing the shit out of ex-ruling party (Republicans). Moscow doesn't have any opposition parties beyond a small powerless communist party. Moscow doesn't even bother having elections for regional governors and just appoints them.
So, does Washington run propaganda campaigns? Sure. They should be. It isn't like the various groups opposed to the US are not running their own. They should be ethical in how they run their campaigns, but it absolutely is their duty to run them. If there is a breach of ethics, it should be investigated and dealt with. That said, I have to roll my eyes and yawn at the editing Wikipedia articles. If they hacked into Wikipedia and deleted change logs, I would be on the OMGWTF bandwagon. If some ass hole in a government office who was tasked with fighting a propaganda campaign was an absolute dumb shit and interpreted those orders as "go edit Wikipedia and leave behind my IP and change logs", than my out rage is reserved to the fact that we would hire such a dumb ass in the first place, not the fact that it was done. I am far more pissed off that my money was wasted on paying some dumbass who thinks that making a few edits to wikipedia, a website specifically design to be resistant against such bone headed attacks, counts as scoring a victory in a propaganda effort against Islamic extremist.
I work for a supplier to the auto industry. The auto industry has a lead time in it that makes 2020 not so far away. For instance, the component that my company works on has been in development for about a year and is getting ready to go to pilot production. Even if things go smooth as silk, that still means that they we are not talking about putting this component into the car by 2011-2012. All of the parts need to be wear tested in the real world. It costs an ugodly amount of money to order a general recall for every single car in the fleet because as it turns out some component in the transmission wears and breaks after a year. You can do simulated wear testing, but even take takes lots of time and money, to say nothing of the challenges of getting a part into full on production mode.
Now, there are obvious and simple things you can do to reduce MPG, like make the car and engine smaller. That might very well be large part of the path. The other path though, developing new technologies and components, takes longer than people realize.
So let me see if I understand your argument. Your argument is that "profiteering" has tacked on a 200% cost increase, and if Wall Street suddenly vanished the price would drop down below a dollar? Further, you argue that somehow this profiteering has gotten worse and resulted in the slow and steady rise of oil prices. The implication being that back in the good old days Wall Street wasn't out to make money and so oil was cheap, and now they have turned really evil and want to make lots of money, so now it is expensive. You really don't think that it could possibly be that growth in oil production has not kept up with the growth in oil demand from the resulting emerging third world economies? China is the second largest consumer of oil today, guess what number they were when your oil cost 79c?
The simple truth is that the boogy man isn't an evil man in a suit laughing with malevolent glee as he makes all the money. The boogy man is the fact that there is an ever expanding demand for oil and the supply to meet the demand isn't growing as fast. The only thing Wall Street does is make it so that you don't pay $10 a gallon when a snow storm hits or an oil producing nation has regional instability.
Further, if you really believe that there is some magical investment that lets you reap massive increases in wealth, why in the hell are you sitting here chatting on Slashdot? Go out and make your fortune and then you won't have to worry about what the cost of oil is when you fill up your car.
Here is the point you are missing. When traders buy oil, they are buying stocks of oil. You might think it is magic that results in the gas station always having oil no matter what is going on int he world, but it isn't. If there were not extra stocks of oil sitting around, you would often have oil shortages any time the demand spiked or the supply dropped off. More than that, the price would constantly be swinging up and down daily by far more than the few tens of cents that it does today.
What a trader does is buy and sell their stocks of oil. So, when a hurricane knocks out oil production for a few weeks, normally oil prices in that area spiking to $300 dollars a barrel Instead, traders start to sell off their stocks. As the price rises, more stocks of oil are sold. As more stocks of oil are sold, the supply goes up and the price drops. The result is that instead of oil prices spiking up 500%, they spike 5%. The problem of course is that you don't want to hold onto oil. Oil sitting around doing nothing costs money to keep and maintain. As you hold onto that oil, you are burning cash. You want to sell the oil at its highest price, but because you are paying out fees for holding it, you can't wait forever. This is what keeps someone from smirking, buying oil when it is cheap, and waiting 10 years to sell it and become a millionaire.
So, it is indeed true that oil prices are some times higher because of Wall Street. The point that is missed, is that some times oil prices are drastically cheaper because Wall Street evens out the supply. What would you rather have, a world where oil is some times a little bit cheaper but occasionally the price spikes 500% in a few days because it is cold, someone started rattling sabers, or a nation collapses in rebellion, or would you rather have a world where the price of oil can wiggle a few percent per week?
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You miss his point. His point is that if you think that there are T1000 kill bots wandering around, you are an idiot. If you think that these will be available in the near future, you are delusional. We will certainly see more robots on the field of combat, but they are not going to be making much in the way of ethical decisions.
I think people don't understand how robots are going to take over the battle field. What is a missile? It is as an "autonomous" robot that seeks out and destroys a target. Sure, you need to tell it what target, but once it fires it will hunt down that target and kill it. That is the sort of thing you will see. You will see weapons where the human can move further and further back from the trigger, and this will happen very slowly. We won't suddenly start crapping out kill bots that roam the street.
There are going to be two big drives towards the increased use of robots in combat.
First, you are going to see a massive increase in the use of drones. Why bother sending an entire airplane with soft and chewy human inside when you can put the humans cockpit on the ground and have a military lawyer leering over his shoulder? Why bother sending some poor saps to run a convoy of supplies when you can keep the drivers in a nice AC controlled trailer and you can keep the gunners surrounded by leering military lawyer reminding them of the prices wording of the roles of engagement?
The US military is really good at defense. In fact, it is pretty much unbeatable when it comes to defending itself from anything other than a first world military power. The Green Zone in Iraq is an almost impossible target where amazingly few people have died. The problem is that when you need to leave a defensive position, you open yourself up to attack. When marines get attacked, they tend to shoot back instead of dying. When you shoot back in a city, people, good and bad, die. Drones help alleviate this problem by first making it so that there is no risk to the operator, removing the kill or be killed mentality that bullets whizzing over your head tends to inspire. Second, it lets command and their small army of lawyers make sure that no one violates the rules of engagement (ROE). Violating the ROEs is easy when you have someone shooting at you. Your buddies are unlikely to inform on you for shooting back (even if it violates the ROE), and you feel a certain moral justification. When you are piloting a drone from an trailer with AC where everything you do is recorded and you have not only your commander, but a lawyer leering over your shoulder, you are a whole lot less likely to violate the ROE. This is what the US military desperately wants. They want a way to go on the offensive with minimal risk to their own soldiers lives AND minimal risk to civilians. Expendable drones that don't care if they die instead of firing back into a crowd are pure gold in the military's thinking.
Second, you are going to see an increase in automated response systems. You will not see terminators, but you might very well see a laser/gun on top of an Humvee shoots at RPG rounds fired at it. You will see these weapons increase in capability slowly over time until they are more and more reactive. These systems will almost certainly be defensive or informative in nature. Imagine a system where if a Humvee sensor spots a gun, it instantly flashes s a high powered light at the target to blind it, plops the targets location down on a map inside the Humvee, takes a picture of the target, and trains a gun on it that will fire on order. I doubt you will see lethal weapons automatically killing people any time soon, but you absolutely will see non-lethal weapons firing without permission. You will also see lethal weapons that prepare to fire and ask for confirmation.
There two methods of increased robotic armies will happen very slowly over time. Eventually, it might lead to automated fighting machines that only call back home to confirm their actions, but it will be many years from now, and it won't be rombas armed with nuclear tipped missiles.
There are two reasons why this guy got dinged. The "competition" piece is one. He has access to sources and reporters, and for that reason anything he writes is suspect. It is pretty easy to think of his as using company resources. It isn't the end of the world, but it is something you want to be open about with your boss.
The other reason why he probably got nailed is because the fact that his job is supposed to be an independent and objective media man, yet he was vocally and publicly anything but. It is one thing to keep a blog about trains or food. It is another thing to be have a hand in an "objective" (yeah, CNN objective, go ahead and laugh) news organization while publicly broadcasting his bias. This is like being a company PR person and being surprised when you get fired after streaking through a news conference. Yeah, that is your "private" life, but part of your value is a perception of integrity. It isn't like that bar is all that high. It is pretty clear lots of people in the news media have a bias, but what makes them and him different is that when Bill O'Reily spews his bias, it is in a form that Fox News approves and markets for. On the other hand NBC would be pissed off of their nightly news anchor started to publicly campaigning for a candidate. They don't care if he tells people in private that he wants Obama to win, but he has to at least keep up the barest minimum of a show of being a "unbiased" reporter.
The reason why they fired this guy is because the last thing in the world they want is for Bill O'Reily to post excerpts of his blog showing that he is a flaming liberal, and then attacking CNN for being a bunch of hippie loving liberals. Yeah, it is hypocritical coming from Fox News, but Fox News wears its bias on its sleeve.
The judge later amended the court order to state that the bank documents need to be removed and took out calling for the domain to be taken. The domain is still down, but the site is still exist with its IP and is mirrored just about everywhere. The larger point is that one silly little low level court judge made a really dumb order that is going to stand for about 30 seconds before he gets smacked around by a bigger judge with a bigger beating stick. Further, this type of action is pocket change compared to hate sites and libel cases that are common in Europe. The US has problems, weak free speech laws are not one of them.
*This is a silly article. That court order was one minor judge, and he backed off it almost the second he let the words slip from his mouth. Further, the rulings of one low level judge does NOT make law.
This is a silly article. That court order was one minor judge, and he backed off it almost the second he let the words slip from his mouth. Further, the rulings of one low level judge does make law. If there was actual precedence set by having this work up the chain of courts, you might have an argument. Until that time, this is just one crappy judge who can have everything he says promptly overturned by the many layers of judges higher than him.
If you want to look at real censorship in the west, turn your eyes outside of the US. The US has no censorship laws around hate speech and almost no libel laws. Almost anything short of conspiracy to commit a crime is a-okay in the US. You can safely write or speak that you think the Holocaust is a hoax, that all the should die, and that is a whore who fucks pigs and goats. None of the above will get you in trouble with US law. All of the above would get you in trouble in more than one European nation. I am not saying that extremely weak libel laws and a lack of hate speech laws is a good thing, just that it decidedly tips the US over on the "free speech" spectrum farther than the vast majority of other nations out there.
There are a lot of complaints you can level against the US like starting wars, kidnapping and torturing people, extra judicial prisons, warrantless wiretaping, etc. That said, free speech is one places where the US is about as liberal as one can possibly be and takes it to extremes that few other nations do.
There is even further silliness that goes on. It could be that people who have cell phones are more likely to drink coffee with saccharine which causes an elevated risk of cancer (I am not saying that is true). What they see is a correlation. It is an interesting correlation, but I would suggest taking it with a grain of salt. There are all sorts of correlations you can find that mask the true underlying cause. I mean hell, for a simple non-PC correlation that will make people's head spin, correlate skin color in the US with education, crime, and income. If you buy that correlation you will end up believing that some how melanin (skin pigment) vastly elevates your chances of becoming a low paid, poorly education, criminal. Correlations just show that two trend move together, not that the trends have anything to do with each other. So, being black might mean that you have an elevated likelihood of being impoverished or sent to jail, but it certainly isn't that pigment causing those things. It is far more likely the fact that you are more likely to have been born in a shitty neighborhood where people get poor wages, poor education, and there is an elevated level of crime.
The same holds for cell phones. People with cell phones might be more likely to get cancer then those without, but it might be that people with cell phones are more likely to perform some behavior that is more likely to give them cancer. You can try and control for these factors, but well, you can only control for the factors that you know exist. If the common link between cell phones and cancer is that cell phone users are more likely to buy sushi, and sushi gives you cancer, the available data won't tell you.
I am not saying that cell phones certainly don't give you elevated chances of cancer, I am just saying that you shouldn't assume that they do because someone found a correlation. If you let your life be ruled by correlations you will quickly go made and likely be no better off for it.
You miss the point of the program. The types of attacks is constantly shifting. Where it shifts to might be unpredictable, but that doesn't mean that you can't catch the shift as it happens. So, imagine all of a sudden you get a few small, but successful attacks on Shiite elementary schools in a certain providence. Your correlation notices that there have been a few attacks, it notes that the attacks 'success' matches what counts as 'success' (high body count, media exposure, low losses, political change, increased sectarian strife, etc.) from previous shifts in targets, and alerts you to expect more attacks on school in that providence, and warns that in a months time you might be facing such attacks in other providences.
On the other hand, imagine that there are a few attacks on school buses. You might be tempted to draw the same conclusion as the school attacks. However, the bus attacks don't meet the pattern. They result in "failure", whatever that might be (high causalities on attackers, minimal media coverage, low body count, etc). The program says not to pour all your resources into fighting this new threat as it is unlikely that the attacks will continue.
I am not saying whether or not such a program is going to work, but the principle is sound. Some types of events lead to other types of events. You might not be predicting what happens in a year, but you might catch a trend before it spread across the entire nation.
Crap like this study is why "sociology" has been downgraded to about the level of astrology in the views of the scientific community. They find some correlation somewhere, and figure out a Marxist theory that somehow could explain the correlation, and then spew this sort of passive aggressive crap. Every time I see a report by a socialogist I want to take and beat them with a stats text book until they realize that A) CORRELATION DOES NOT FUCKING IMPLY CAUSATION. That goes double and triple when look at social factors then tend to correlate on all sorts of utterly unrelated and independent things. B) Act like a science and put the copy of Marx down. I got to know known the entire 2006 Master of Social Science class at the University of Chicago (this is the top 1 or 2 school for social science). There were a lot of good and fun people among them, but they ALL shared one thing in common. They were all raging over the top socialist. Never in my entire life have I seen such a complete lack of diversity in thought. As an evil terrorist engineer, I met people with all types of beliefs and value systems. Sociologist the other hand are almost entirely and uniformly extreme leftist. The only diversity they have among them is if they are super leftist or ultra-radical leftist. I am left of center, and I still found it utterly nauseating.
I don't know what the hell it is they are doing to the kids that enter social science. I am not sure if it is just that somehow all the teachers are radical leftists and all the kids who don't carry around a copy of Marx throw up their hands in disgust, or if they really are so crafty at brain washing, but it is sad, pathetic, and the lack of critical thought in social science has made it a field of junk science. The insular, circular, masturbatory thought that goes on inside American's social science academic institutions is pathetic. With not a single critical voice in the entire field, the result is ideas (good and bad) receive no real criticism from anything that isn't in deep left field.
The result? You get this sort of crap publish where a social "scientist" finds two correlations and instantly links them together. This same sort of logic would leave you to believe that skin pigmentation causes you to be a criminal. Here, lets use social "science" methods on something else. Blacks are more likely to be criminals than whites in the US. Blacks have higher levels of skin pigment. Therefor, skin pigment must give you a "criminal mindset". That is the sort of junk science that social science methods will lead you to believe. God forbid they take a deeper look at anything and find any other potential relationships that don't fit with their narrow world view. Just say no to social "science".
I am sorry, I think I missed your argument. Your argument is that Bush is the devil and that somehow this translates into GM not making environmentally friendly cars.
GM doesn't make environmentally friendly cars unless they have to because they cost more and Americans really don't give a shit. There is certainly a small market for hybrid cars in working professional elite who can afford them and see them as status symbols. This really is the only reason why GM doesn't sell environmentally friendly cars. Simply put, people want cheap cars far more than they want green cars.
Corporations are big dumb beasts. They will do pretty much exactly what you want them to do. If the people want gas guzzling SUV pieces of shit, they will get them. If they wanted to drop an extra $10,000 more into their car for a "green" car, they would get those too.
You should be skeptical when someone says they can say the ocean has risen 0.2mm. If that is the only number they have given, they are liars, stupid, or both. The world's oceans might very well have risen that much, and it might very well be something you can measure. That said, I can promise that there is an uncertainty in that measurement. Someone who fails to report their level of uncertainty is either incompetent or taking you for a ride. This is why I suggest taking newspaper science with a grain of sea salt. 0.2mm with a 95% confidence of +/- 0.01m is a whole hell of a lot different from 0.2mm with a 95% confidence of +/-0.2mm.
OMG!!!11!!! The plastic... it is so shinny... and white... and smooth... ohhhhh.
As far as RFID and DNA goes (and I assume you are talking about the US, and not UK like in the article), there is no constitutional barrier collecting criminal DNA in the US. In the US you are entitled to "due process", but once you get your due process they can merrily collect evidence as they please and keep the records of it until hell freezes over. For better or for worse, your DNA is evidence. In the same way they keep a picture or fingerprints you on file, they can also keep your DNA as just another metric used to tell if you commit another crime.
The issue isn't keeping such evidence. I don't mind if a rapist gets all his information stored away on some computer for life. The larger concern is what constitutes a crime and if we are using our technology properly in a court room. We have a problem that is only going to get worse. We are going to continue to be able to collect more and better evidence from crimes. The problem is that this evidence will become more and more technical as time goes on. The problem isn't DNA evidence, it is interpreting DNA evidence. I can interpret witness testimony, logical arguments, and things of that nature using the faculties that everyone is born with. Interpreting complex technologically based evidence on the other hand demands a specialist. The jury basically is forced to listen to a specialist and simply trust that their judgment is correct, because there is no way they can see and interpret the evidence for themselves.
What is the solution? The hell if I know.
Once your coal resources are being used for other things besides generating power, the cost of electricity will go up. How much and how soon is anyones guess at this point however. Even this is not a huge worry. Making oil out of coal is fairly expensive. There are a lot of much easier and cheaper ways to get oil. Hell, Canada has as much oil as Saudi Arabia in its shale oil fields (think tar like oil that takes extra processing). Further, the US has a massive coal supply. I think it was projected at being a 250 year coal supply or something like that. There is nothing that can deplete that in the next 100 years.
The only good reason to think about alternative energies for the grid in the US is to be more green. If consumer energy prices go up, it will only because he intentionally made them go up through carbon taxes, carbon trading, and other such efforts to provide a market reason to dump coal in favor of greener technologies. People really need to separate out the oil issue with the consumer electricity issues.
I am not at all against working for a greener grid, but the oil issue is probably the bigger of the two issues. Oil produces both environmental harm and opens up oil consuming nations to economic and political harm. Some of the best solutions to the oil problem is to make it a grid problem. Plug in hybrids or even hydrogen powered cars could make it so that ALL problems are a grid problem. Then, once you make the grid both green and economical, you make the transportation industry green and economical.
Oil at $100 does NOTHING to electricity prices. Oil is almost never burned to make electricity. The only time you burn oil to make electricity is when you need to meet a sudden increase in demand. You can turn on a gas turbine very quickly while coal, nuclear, etc takes months or years to turn on. Once you have met the demand, you can simply turn it off. The only thing high oil prices does is make running car off the grid (through hydrogen, batteries, whatever) more attractive. Of course, as soon as you actually start powering your entire transportation industry off the grid the price of electricity goes up and oil looks more attractive...
The only good reason to worry about where our electricity comes from is for environmental reasons. There is absolutely nothing economically wrong with burning coal for another hundred years or so.
Are you for the censorship of books? Do you think that Harry Potter needs to be tossed before a government review board to decide it is ok for children. If the review bored decides that its depictions of violence are too much, should a librarian or book seller be tossed fined or and thrown before a court?
When you can stand up to me and tell me that ALL media, including art, books, newspapers, music, etc need to go before a fucking government censorship board, than I will swallow that you despise free speech enough to actually want this. Until then, it is far more likely that video games are just the target of the month because Clinton reads books, but probably doesn't indulge in video games all that often. Oh yeah, and the first politician to suggest that we need to pass books through a fucking government censorship board would (rightly) have their balls (or ovaries) removed first by the public, and than again by the courts.
It isn't new physics. It is called geometry. If you fire a gun at a target that is 5cm big at point blank range, you will hit it. If on the other hand you fire at a target that is 5cm big that is 5 miles away (assuming the bullet fire perfectly straight and didn't drop) you would miss. That is because even the slightest deflection results in missing. The difference between being a degree off when you are at point blank range, and when you are a mile off is massive. Do you want me to do the calculation for you?
These people should be punished. Here are my problems what happened.
1) Hitting a helicopter "by accident" is roughly impossible. The laser shoots out a beam that is at most a couple of centimeters in diameter. The odds of a beat that small hitting a helicopter by accident is damn near zero. That is like closing your swatting at the air, and snapping a fly that is buzzing around your head out of the air by accident. It is bullshit. A helicopter at 500 feet is a target smaller than a few centimeters. Your chance of randomly pointing at it are roughly zero. Far more likely than an "accident" is that they pointed at the helicopter because green lasers are cool and when you have one, you want to laser everything in sight. A jury just needs to find them guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt". I have a very reasonable doubt that that it was an accident (though that is up to a jury to decide in the end).
2) Every green laser comes with a warning telling you specifically NOT to point at people and vehicles. The laser doesn't even have to hit your eye directly, simply having it hit something reflective inside the cockpit is enough to blind the the pilot. Hitting the pilot in the eye is enough to cause some harm. Even if they caused no harm, it was dangerous and stupid and very well could of. Driving home drunk is also dangerous and stupid, and you will get nailed for it even if you fail to wipe out a mini-van full of children. Yes, the law really can (and should) smack you across the head for being dangerous and stupid to others.
Unless it turns out that they had some sort of malicious intent (which I doubt, they were probably just dumb), I don't think that they should face the maximum penalty, and I doubt they will. That said, they should be smacked hard enough for it to hurt to serve as a warning to others that firing high powered lasers at vehicles is a bad thing. It is lack nabbing a drunk driver. Even if they did no harm and feel bad, you still punish because it will discourage future stupidity and it will serve as warning to others that such stupidity will not be tolerated.
There are a lot of dumb federals laws on the books. The law against firing high powered lasers at vehicles is not one of them.
The problem is that democracy sucks. Democracy leads to countless evils. Slavery in the US was democracy in action, as were Jim Crow Laws. The South splitting from the US was democracy in action. Hitler rising to power was democracy in action. There is nothing "good" about democracy other than it leaves a way to kick someone who is utterly incompetent out of power. Democracy is less likely to cause brutal oppression than a dictatorship due to the electorate having the ability to remove the government, but it is by no means a guarantee.
The US constitution, something that is generally revered as being as a model constitution is an example of an UNDEMOCRATIC document. The constitution sets in place limits that a democratically elected government must follow, irregardless of what the will of the people is. It sets in place a method of changing the constitution that demands far more than a "democratic" majority vote. The Supreme Court which upholds the constitution is an example of an undemocratic institution. In fact, I would say the things I like best about the American part are its undemocratic parts, not the democratically elected pieces of it.
So, is a filibuster an example of an anti-democratic purpose? Hell yes, and I love it! The best thing about the American system is the fact that a simple majority can't impose its will upon the minority. In order to get even the simplest of things done, you need a majority of 60%. To get truly earth shattering done (like changing the constitution), you need a super majority well over 2/3's. This is a good thing. This is one of the reasons why despite Europe being far more liberal than the US, the US still has much strong free speech laws. It isn't because Americans are hippies, it is because the non-democratic aspects of the American government make it virtually impossible to pass anti-free speech legislation, and even when it is passed, it promptly gets struck down.
I say hurray for the non-democratic institutions. I think we need MORE of them. This world needs more liberal (liberal as in liberty, not leftist) institutions and less democracy.
Uh, I give the odds roughly a 0.000000000000001% chance that he will stay in office. If you believe that Bush is going to stay in office for even a second longer than the end of this term, you are kind of an idiot. Nothing short of a nuclear holocausts that destroys Washington AND the president in waiting could keep him in office for another term. If Bush tried to stay in office, the following would happen; the secret service step aside as the ex-president went to jail. If the secret service fought that (which they wouldn't by the way, they give their oath to the constitution, not the president, but lets play pretend), law enforcement would remove him. If they couldn't a riot of people would remove him. If they couldn't the military would remove him. The presidents authority only extends as far as his ability to give orders and have them followed. Absolutely no branch in the US government, both civilian and military, would follow an order let an ousted president stay on in office, even if an ex-president suffered a sudden psychotic episode that would make him try and give such an order. All branches of the US government and military swear and oath to the constitution, NOT the president.
Take off your tin foil hat. It is frying your brain.
There are few things more annoying than when people ignore scale. What Moscow does and what Washington does in terms of media manipulation is night and day. Washington does merrily try and get its perspective thrown into a favorable light... like all the other governments in the world. It might even use shitty tactics some times. The difference is the scale. Washington performs card tricks while Moscow makes 747's disappear. Last time I checked, no one is dying to find a loop hole to keep Bush in office and his approval rating is hovering somewhere around a truly impressive 30%. If anything, all of Bush successors are trying desperately to avoid using his name as anything other than a curse word. The opposition party in the US (Democrats) are in the processes of trashing the shit out of ex-ruling party (Republicans). Moscow doesn't have any opposition parties beyond a small powerless communist party. Moscow doesn't even bother having elections for regional governors and just appoints them.
So, does Washington run propaganda campaigns? Sure. They should be. It isn't like the various groups opposed to the US are not running their own. They should be ethical in how they run their campaigns, but it absolutely is their duty to run them. If there is a breach of ethics, it should be investigated and dealt with. That said, I have to roll my eyes and yawn at the editing Wikipedia articles. If they hacked into Wikipedia and deleted change logs, I would be on the OMGWTF bandwagon. If some ass hole in a government office who was tasked with fighting a propaganda campaign was an absolute dumb shit and interpreted those orders as "go edit Wikipedia and leave behind my IP and change logs", than my out rage is reserved to the fact that we would hire such a dumb ass in the first place, not the fact that it was done. I am far more pissed off that my money was wasted on paying some dumbass who thinks that making a few edits to wikipedia, a website specifically design to be resistant against such bone headed attacks, counts as scoring a victory in a propaganda effort against Islamic extremist.
I work for a supplier to the auto industry. The auto industry has a lead time in it that makes 2020 not so far away. For instance, the component that my company works on has been in development for about a year and is getting ready to go to pilot production. Even if things go smooth as silk, that still means that they we are not talking about putting this component into the car by 2011-2012. All of the parts need to be wear tested in the real world. It costs an ugodly amount of money to order a general recall for every single car in the fleet because as it turns out some component in the transmission wears and breaks after a year. You can do simulated wear testing, but even take takes lots of time and money, to say nothing of the challenges of getting a part into full on production mode.
Now, there are obvious and simple things you can do to reduce MPG, like make the car and engine smaller. That might very well be large part of the path. The other path though, developing new technologies and components, takes longer than people realize.
So let me see if I understand your argument. Your argument is that "profiteering" has tacked on a 200% cost increase, and if Wall Street suddenly vanished the price would drop down below a dollar? Further, you argue that somehow this profiteering has gotten worse and resulted in the slow and steady rise of oil prices. The implication being that back in the good old days Wall Street wasn't out to make money and so oil was cheap, and now they have turned really evil and want to make lots of money, so now it is expensive. You really don't think that it could possibly be that growth in oil production has not kept up with the growth in oil demand from the resulting emerging third world economies? China is the second largest consumer of oil today, guess what number they were when your oil cost 79c?
The simple truth is that the boogy man isn't an evil man in a suit laughing with malevolent glee as he makes all the money. The boogy man is the fact that there is an ever expanding demand for oil and the supply to meet the demand isn't growing as fast. The only thing Wall Street does is make it so that you don't pay $10 a gallon when a snow storm hits or an oil producing nation has regional instability.
Further, if you really believe that there is some magical investment that lets you reap massive increases in wealth, why in the hell are you sitting here chatting on Slashdot? Go out and make your fortune and then you won't have to worry about what the cost of oil is when you fill up your car.
Here is the point you are missing. When traders buy oil, they are buying stocks of oil. You might think it is magic that results in the gas station always having oil no matter what is going on int he world, but it isn't. If there were not extra stocks of oil sitting around, you would often have oil shortages any time the demand spiked or the supply dropped off. More than that, the price would constantly be swinging up and down daily by far more than the few tens of cents that it does today.
What a trader does is buy and sell their stocks of oil. So, when a hurricane knocks out oil production for a few weeks, normally oil prices in that area spiking to $300 dollars a barrel Instead, traders start to sell off their stocks. As the price rises, more stocks of oil are sold. As more stocks of oil are sold, the supply goes up and the price drops. The result is that instead of oil prices spiking up 500%, they spike 5%. The problem of course is that you don't want to hold onto oil. Oil sitting around doing nothing costs money to keep and maintain. As you hold onto that oil, you are burning cash. You want to sell the oil at its highest price, but because you are paying out fees for holding it, you can't wait forever. This is what keeps someone from smirking, buying oil when it is cheap, and waiting 10 years to sell it and become a millionaire.
So, it is indeed true that oil prices are some times higher because of Wall Street. The point that is missed, is that some times oil prices are drastically cheaper because Wall Street evens out the supply. What would you rather have, a world where oil is some times a little bit cheaper but occasionally the price spikes 500% in a few days because it is cold, someone started rattling sabers, or a nation collapses in rebellion, or would you rather have a world where the price of oil can wiggle a few percent per week?
Answer this simple question: How exactly does Wall Street change the price of oil? Think this one out before answering.